The Republican Party Sucks
Originally published May 14, 2021
Once upon a time, the Republican Party didn’t suck. Actually, there were lots of times it didn’t suck.
It didn’t suck when, at its founding in the late 1850s, it declared slavery an inhumane, barbaric practice, and eventually ended it. It didn’t suck when it ended repressive and predatory Mormon polygamy a few decades later. It didn’t suck when it declared late 19th-century corporate monopolies to be injurious to representative democracy and citizen welfare, and diminished their power.
It didn’t suck under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who presided over a postwar era of peace and prosperity. It didn’t suck when it fought segregationist Democrats to ensure equal application of the law. It didn’t suck when it fought against communism for half a century, and then won.
But starting with the presidency of George H. W. Bush, it really began sucking....
It was Bush Senior who pushed America into the first Persian Gulf War amidst a massive PR snow job... He relentlessly preached free trade ideology, eventually signing NAFTA in December of 1992. He laid the groundwork for the World Trade Organization, which would officially emerge in 1995. He began pushing for open trade with Communist China....
It includes W’s proto-Woke demand, immediately after the [9/11] attacks... and deny, against all sense and reason, that Islamic terrorism had anything to do with Islam....
And now, post-Trump, the Republican Party still sucks... ;Consider, just for starters, that as the Biden Administration resumes the national demolition job started by Barack Obama, but interrupted by Trump, Republicans overall have remained oddly passive.... it can’t even manage to stick up for the reality of biological sex anymore....
Those of us in favor of what Burke called “ordered liberty” and a revitalized America view the Democratic Party as a target worth destroying. Before that can happen, however, we need to destroy—or at least conquer and completely recreate—another target altogether: the Republican Party.
Why? Because it sucks.
Unsucking the Republican Party - The GOP must become the party of patriotic populism. Permanently, by Tal Bachman, American Greatness, May 26, 2021:
... One of the persistent problems here, after all, is that while rank-and-file Republican voters understand how grotesque and destructive the Democratic Party has become, not enough realize their own party’s been playing them for suckers for three decades....
But it’s not 1980 anymore. It’s nearly half a century after 1980. The circumstances, the stakes, the players, the dangers, are much different now. The country is more culturally and economically polarized, more volatile, more democratically unstable, more hollowed out industrially, more unsure of itself, more demoralized, and more mentally ill....
Through its American companies and corporate partners, the Chinese Communist Party has already achieved remarkable leverage over the country. Some, um, “conspiracy theorists” have even wondered if China has essentially purchased top politicians and influencers, including the entire Biden Administration....
The first, most important thing is to secure elections at every level. Without that, nothing else matters. (And this effort should be framed as “voter protection,” since the elimination of fraudulent votes protects the value of genuine votes)....
But the fact is that if Republicans don’t take power and use it for good, Democrats take it and use it for ill...